Another Pointless Round of NATO Expansion

Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) presided over a unanimous vote Tuesday ratifying a treaty to accept Montenegro as the latest member of NATO. Backers want the Senate to take up the measure later this week, when two-thirds of senators would need to approve it in order for Montenegro to be on its way to becoming the 29th member of the alliance.

The outcome of the vote today was a foregone conclusion, and I imagine the floor vote will be just as lopsided and predictable. Unlike bringing in Georgia or Ukraine, letting Montenegro in doesn’t pose the same risk of triggering a conflict with Russia, but it is also unnecessary and serves no real purpose. Neither the U.S. nor NATO will be more secure as a result of this move, and Washington will have yet another security dependent that it doesn’t need and shouldn’t want to have. Montenegro won’t really be any more secure than it is now, because it isn’t under any threat that joining NATO can protect against. Adding Montenegro to the alliance is pointless in itself, but it is unfortunate in that it keeps the idea of continued NATO expansion alive.

Joining NATO is the prize that Montenegro gets for its “pro-Western” orientation, and so the alliance continues to expand for reasons that have nothing to do with collective security. As a practical matter, adding one more member to NATO just makes the alliance that much more unwieldy and incapable of consensus. The good news is that this will make it slightly more difficult to get all members on board for the next war of choice carried out under alliance auspices, and the bad news is that it will make a coordinated response to real security threats harder to organize. It goes without saying that the alliance should stop here and be finished with expansion at least for the foreseeable future and preferably forever.

8 Responses to Another Pointless Round of NATO Expansion

Well I’d think it must have something to do with surveillance and security monitoring, something like that. Serbians being closer to the Russians, relatively near Chechnya and so on. Probably some black sites, that stuff. Seems dumb, otherwise, but you know, game has changed. I doubt it has much to do with a land war.

I don’t find it an especially useful idea, but if I were Montenegrin and wanting to stay in the Western European alignment, I could certainly see wanting security protection from Serbia. And/or protection from internal problems spilling over the border from Kosovo or Albania.

Montenegrins certainly have an impressive history as warriors going back a long way. Perhaps they see a role vaguely analogous to the Gurkhas?

On the part of the NATO countries that will be footing the bill, I can see a couple of possible advantages:

1) Assuming a fear that Serbia will (re-)gravitate toward the Russian alignment,

1a) Keep the today largely hypothetical but not at all historically implausible Serbian-Russian alliance out of the Adriatic.

1b) An extra border on which to apply pressure to Serbia (e.g. maybe over Kosovo, which has to be one of the most useless quasi-clients ever)?

2) Keep Russia out of the Adriatic in general.

To emphasize, I don’t think these are sufficient reasons, but it’s less nuts than Georgia (a low bar, admittedly).

Re: “As a practical matter, adding one more member to NATO just makes the alliance that much more unwieldy and incapable of consensus. The good news is that this will make it slightly more difficult to get all members on board for the next war of choice carried out under alliance auspices,” . . .

Unfortunately, no. The more members there are, and the more insignificant and weak they are, the more they simply obey orders from the one member that is “more equal” than all the others.

NATO will be cut to size if Donald Trumps makes good his promise to insist on the European members of the union pay their fair shares to the union. That would put the a check on those countries which can hardly balance their budgets to stay away. But as long as the only price required to join the union is hostility towards Russia, all the improverished countries in Eastern Europe would do anything to get in. Who would not want a freebie from Uncle Sam, even if Uncle Sam’s own children are being neglected?

Before I decided on a different life change, I was seriously considering Montenegro as a place of opportunity, not just because it’s a cheap place with easy business laws and a small-town feel, but also because it’s been a place where both American and Russian citizens can visit without a visa. One gets the feeling there are people in authority who just don’t want the rest of us to know peace and prosperity.